Just big enough for two, she thought happily.
Adrian was already busy in the kitchen; she wandered in, took a carrot and nibbled on it while she perched on a stool and watched him work.
'I get a man who's soulfully beautiful, with a body like a Greek god, knows just how to tie a girl up, he's rich and he cooks. There's no justice in the world and for once I'm the beneficiary.'
'Of a surety there isn't, or you would have better,' he said, pouring her a glass from the bottle of red wine he'd opened. 'But this is scarcely cooking; mere unpacking and setting out. Noemi has been very thorough. Hand me those tomatoes, would you?'
She did, then hooked her feet up on a rung, sipping and watching the smooth fluidity of his motions, chuckling occasionally when he added a flourish like flipping a knife up to the ceiling and catching it as it fell; it was a pleasure with a slight frisson, when she recalled the things she'd seen him do with the same assurance. For a moment the wine distracted her.
'What is this?'
'Domaine de la Butte Bourgueil Mi-Pente 2003,' he said. 'That was a wonderful year, but perhaps…No, it's still at its peak. That hint of chocolate is nice, eh?'
They sat and ate: salad, olives, charcuterie of dry sausage and cured ham and rabbit terrine with herbs, a round loaf of pain Poilane that crackled when you cut it, butter, a hard dry white cheese that bit gently at the mouth. She looked down again when he served the ice cream and she took her first taste. Dense, rich, tasting of actual cream and fruit…
'My God,' she said.
'I told you so.'
She tried to kick him beneath the table, and found her foot trapped under his. 'You mustn't become predictable, my sweet.'
Noemi Lasalle gave them another set of kisses when they left. It was full dark now, or at least as dark as it got in a major city, with the tall buildings of La Defense showing to one side in the middle distance and the lower- rise center of Paris to the other. The granite paving blocks glistened in the light of the cast-iron street lamps, and the heavy, silty smell of the Seine was all around them. It was cool enough to make her jacket comfortable; that also made her less self-conscious about going armed. Beneath it she wore a silk shirt, and tights and a pleated skirt and soft black pumps.
And a knife and an automatic pistol. Welcome to married life, she thought mordantly.
Ellen tucked her arm through Adrians; the wine bar they were looking for was at 1 Quai de Bourbon, which put it at the corner with the bridge leading off the island. She looked to her right; the site of the Bastille was that way.
'Don't tell me the Shadowspawn were to blame for that,' she said lightly; there were advantages to a husband who could sense your feelings.
'No. Too early. Though the Marquis de Sade…'
'At last, something good they did!'
He shook his head and staggered slightly, unlike his usual cat gracefulness. She put out a hand.
'Adrian?'
'I…am a little confused.'
'Why?'
'This meeting is a nexus of…possible events. Events which depend on our decisions and actions; they will close some possible paths, open others, make some more or less likely. But there are other decision points crowding in: more and more and more, in the immediate future. I have never felt anything quite like it. And they are blurred . So many minds, so many of them with the Power and striving to warp the path of the future.'
He shook himself slightly, as if to brace himself. Au Franc Pinot had a narrow blue-fronted entrance, and the steps led down to an atmospheric vaulted-stone cellar. It was pleasant, in a funky, run-down manner, though there was a very slight but definite odor of damp stone, and the tables were islands of candlelight.
Adrian sighed a little as they sat. 'I used to come here while I was at La Sorbonne,' he said. 'It was a jazz club then, and a very good one. Though the food was execrable, but of course nobody goes to the Ile Saint-Louis to eat. '
'It's a bad-food zone?'
'No, not quite that. You can get a decent meal here. Not one of the famous gastronomique areas, though, nothing to attract someone looking for a special treat.'
He flicked a finger in the air for two glasses of white wine and settled in to wait with a hunter's patience. Ellen took out her notepad instead, and found herself looking at a headline for want of anything better to do.
'It's amazing how she's aged,' Ellen said, looking at the president's picture. 'They all do.'
Adrian leaned over to take a glance and nodded. 'And I know why. A day or two after their inauguration, they get a visit in the White House from the Council's representatives.'
'You're kidding,' Ellen said.
I knew they were pulling the strings from behind the scenes, but they put the gimp on the president in the Oval Office? I thought that meant something more subtle.
'Yes. In fact, they require him, or her these days, to make a human sacrifice just to drive the lesson home, and for amusement. From the time of…Mmmm, I think Woodrow Wilson was the first.'
'Wilson?'
'Note that he was elected on a promise to keep America out of World War One. Then he declared war on Germany. He turned into an old man overnight. Then he had a stroke. I suspect he tried to assert himself, and that is why he took so long dying.'
Ellen turned her head and looked at him. Sometimes he does these convoluted practical jokes…
His face was dead serious. She winced.
'This stuff just keeps getting worse.'
I mean, what I went through with Adrienne was worse for me, but that gives me an idea of the scale we're talking about.
'And you wondered why I was always so gloomy,' he said.
'Darling, before…'
Before you told me anything, and then I left you because you wouldn't open up, and then Adrienne kidnapped me on the rebound, as it were.
'…I thought you were fascinatingly, broodingly, insanely, irritatingly romantic.'
'And now?'
'Now I just think you're depressive and it's going to be my mission in life to keep you from turning in diminishing circles until you vanish up your own fundament.'
He smiled at her, and she simply sat for a moment appreciating. A man cleared his throat.
'Monsieur Breze?'
The man was middle-aged and thin, with an unfashionable grizzled ponytail and an aquiline face; in Santa Fe she'd have typed him as one of the inevitable aging hippies, though he was dressed rather better in a Euro-casual way. His brown eyes were uncomfortably acute, as well as holding the usual male appreciation. Her experience with Peter Boase at Rancho Sangre had taught her that physicists were no more likely than artists to live up to their stereotypes-less so, since artists were more prone to doing it deliberately.
'Professor Duquesne?'
The man nodded, and they exchanged names and handshakes all around in the European manner. Duquesne remained silent for a moment afterwards, studying them both. At last he spoke:
'So, monsieur. You have persuaded me to talk with you.' A slight smile. 'A quarter of a million euros will buy even a crank an evening of my time.'
Adrian shrugged expressively-money was more or less meaningless to him, since he could have as much as he wanted. He also suppressed a movement that was almost certainly a reach for his cigarettes. Duquesne's eyebrows rose fractionally; Paris had held out on no-smoking rules longer than most other first-world places, but the changeover wasn't exactly recent. A man of Adrian's apparent age should have been used to it.
'I think I can convince you that I am, at the least, not a crank, Professor,' Adrian said. 'Have you examined the files I sent you?'
